Schools Are Outdated | Teen Ink

Schools Are Outdated

September 5, 2019
By Janco BRONZE, Pretoria, Other
Janco BRONZE, Pretoria, Other
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
Conformity is the jailor of freedom and the enemy of growth. - President John F. Kennedy


It is always engraved into our minds how social media is bad for developing children/students, because today a student not only has to endure bullying at school, but now bullying can also be dragged to the former safe environment of his/her own home via the “demonic cell phone”. According to every speech from numerous teachers and experts in the field this often leads to serious depression, anxiety, low self-confidence and sometimes even suicide.

What they don’t tell us, is that back in the days children of all ages were happy, energetic, curious, creative and intellectual beings. I strongly believe that this did not change due to social media and more technology, but rather the way in which schools of today also spills over into students’ safe spaces, commonly referred to as home, and personal time by stuffing their “off” time with loads of projects and heaps of homework (a lot more than in previous years according to older people I’ve spoken with) replacing former tranquil, and utterly necessary for both mental and physical health, time with busy stressful schedules that can cause all of the symptoms social media is so commonly blamed for.

This leaves no time for children to be children by learning from the vast world itself and to develop basic thinking skills and imagination, and today we see books titled “How to switch on your brain” in bookshops across the globe. Today students are programmed to perfection to perform just like computers; information in, as fast and as much as possible, and information out in a different useable form without the student ever having to have understood even a single word of the project he/she just achieved 98% with.

Schools are producing unconscious and far too “sane” minds, resulting in a population of sheep, which would’ve been perfectly fine during the Victorian era (during which the first ever massed scale schools were introduced). But today it leaves millions vulnerable against the threat of being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The skills we as humans need to survive in the rapidly changing world outside of school gates, like creativity, imagination and the basic ability of being able to think outside of the box, are not taught in schools, but rather schools prevent any opportunity for developing these skills by making “use” of every little bit of students’ “spare” time.

Of course schools shift the blame to AI for the prevention and destruction of these skills, so that schools wouldn’t have to lift a finger to adapt to a new world in which AI exists, but rather to brainwash us all to boycott AI so that schools can keep on prospering like they’ve done in the Victorian world (when women were still regarded as property and Napoleon still reigned over France).


The author's comments:

I'm a fifteen-year-old scholar that believes the education system is one of the most inefficient things man has ever conjured up. I'm also a novice novelist.


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